Unoffensive and well executed but does not sound groundbreaking today
Great prog pop. As usual, a double album could probably be an even better single album but there is something about it being too long that is appropriate to the genre.
Several tracks such as "Stepping Out" would be at home on an alternate universe Let It Be album - down to the overblown arrangement.
Neither this style of music in general nor this specific album's abusive and violent themes entertain me.
Felt like a creative debut album with lots of ideas and potential and but not lots of focus and polish. I'd like to hear more "Utopia" and less "Oompah Radar". 2.5/5
This album left me wanting more.
I loved the rhythms, the brass/sax and the rhythms - since there were often more than one at a time.
5 stars - one for each of the stages of grief.
A crisp voice that prays, placates, laments and rages, paired with pitch-perfect arrangements that never overpower the lyrics.
Such a strong debut album with one of the most incomparable covers of all time. (See what I did there.)
Hidden gem: Black Boys on Mopeds. The lyric "Remember what I told you. If they hated me they will hate you" would turn out to be all too prophetic.
Slightly funky house music.
The one standout track is groovy but doesn't make the heart of an epic album.
Polished sultry ballads, perfect for a 1980s movie soundtrack, without falling into the sax solo stereotype.
I wondered why we were recommended this album and not the original groundbreaking Folsome Prison album.
But this way on the extended album we get more of Cash's hits catalogue, more of his musical collaborators chiefly June Carter and more a celebratory mood.
I love how the crowd is like another character in the audio landscape in a way a concert hall crowd is not on a generic live album.
Meh
What a high-energy opening banger, and I can hear the theatricality dripping through and rest of this heavy rock / psychedelic / classic rock'n'roll fusion. I enjoyed the album and can only imagine how fun a live concert would have been.
The impact of a great debut album can spawn a whole original genre.
The introduction of lesser first albums lay no claim to even a stylistic revival.
New "New Wave" waves, waives new new wave wave.
There are any number of musical cast recordings to which I would rather be listening, The Threepenny Opera for example.
One seedy jazz hand.
Everything you could want from an indie rock album to end the 90s.
PJ Harvey transforms teenage angst into mature anguish.
Still grungy, but now all the more beautiful for it.
Four hustlers before they started side hustling.
The funky edge of both albums is seductively infecious. The growing contrast of OutKast's two stars is evident.
Big Boi is motivated rap: contmeplating the ongoing cyles of violence after 911, asking the for meaning of life and praying for repentence.
Andre 3000 is party pop: contemplating his lady spreading, asking where her panties have gone and thanking the Lord that she "got that thang".
Three and a half shakes of a polaroid picture.
His harmonica played the skeleton keys and his brand new leopard skin electric guitar solo jaded the folk scene. But it is the way this noble poet half-spoke his rhymes like a slow-motion rapper that "showed, corrode, flowed, the road, was owed" and "explodes" in our ears.
A great album that rewards repeated listening.
Four 'I-want-you's plus a 'so-bad-honey'. 4.5
He might be famous for influencing later piano men (Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Harry Connick Jr) but none of the instruments sound virtuosic here. It is Charles' soulful voice that surpasses the piano, big band, and string orchestra on this album and turns the blues a bright sunny yellow.
Three-and-a-half octaves vocal range: 3.5
Like a Rock'n'Roll missing link, Jerry Lee Lewis bridges the Boogie Woogie bass of a generation earlier to the aggressive energy of punk, which was still to come.
He is pilfering, pioneering and problematic all at once.
Four alive and kicking tracks - before I changed over to listen to Little Richard.
4
Fine legible rap from the 90s (before the mumble) with a lo-fi beat and laidback delivery that has LL Cool J confessing "I'm totally relaxed" even while singing about racist police corruption.
3 internal rhymes.
